Happy New Year 2022

2021 was another year of challenges and perseverance. The challenges of the pandemic have inspired academics around the world to stay positive going forward. The School of Data Science (SCDC) of the City University of Hong Kong has adapted to the new normal swiftly, proactively, and with firm resolve. On a global scale, people are adopting new practices to continue teaching, learning, working, and living everyday lives. In particular, the assistance offered by digital technologies has become vitally important, and data science has played a dominant role in this area.
 
Today, the expedited development of data science has benefitted from the digitization of our physical world. In addition to enriching daily lives, data science has also thrived in cross-disciplinary research. We remain focused on growing the School of Data Science as the world becomes ever unpredictable due to COVID-19. With -successful recruitment in the past year, the number of distinguished faculty members at SCDC has increased by more than 50%. More importantly, nearly half of the new faculty are female. Our teaching and research outcomes have also been well recognized. Six faculty members are ranked in the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists published by Stanford University. This year our faculty have again received great honors, such as our President and also faculty member at SDSC Professor Way Kuo being elected International Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Chair Professor being elected as a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea, our Professors winning CityU’s Outstanding Research Award for Junior Faculty, and being elevated to IEEE Fellow. A research team won the “Best Poster Award” at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM). Another team won the “Best Paper Award” at the 3rd International Conference on Industrial Artificial Intelligence (IAI 2021), which was selected from around 200 academic papers presented at the conference.
 
Our mission at SCDC is to nurture data science talent. Just established three years ago, we currently enroll around 500 undergraduates and postgraduates. Six of our PhD students are recipients of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS). We have produced nearly 200 Master’s and PhD graduates. We admit among the best graduate students from around the globe – more than 90% of our postgraduates have come from top universities from overseas and mainland China. At the international level, data science has made a seminal contribution to the world and has been an attractive discipline for study among young people.
 
As we welcome a time of renewal, allow me to wish you continued success in contributing to our communities and in fostering the advancement of learning. May I wish you a healthy and prosperous new year. 
 
Sincerely,
Professor S. Joe QIN
Dean of the School of Data Science
City University of Hong Kong